Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach Gníomhach. Fáiltím roimh an deis cúpla focal a rá faoin ábhar seo. Tá sé thar a bheith tábhachtach. Aontaím leis an mBille agus aontaím go bhfuil gá práinneach leis an mBille a chur tríd an Dáil. I welcome the opportunity to say a few words on this.

The Minister has my support with regard to passing this legislation as speedily as possible. I have read the digest. The Minister explained in his opening statement that there are two areas of reform, one of which is to allow a pause in maternity leave for women who have a serious mental or physical illness. I appreciate that. I appreciate the work of his Department and also the women who forced this change. I will not repeat what he said but I share the Minister's gratitude to those people.

This legislation also seeks to introduce reform of maternity leave for Members of the House. It is of interest how far back people have campaigned for this. The current Ceann Comhairle sponsored the Maternity Protection (Members of the Houses of the Oireachtas) Bill 2013 and in 2020, Deputies Niamh Smyth and Anne Rabbitte sought to force this change. It is unfortunate that the Bill has to be rushed through the Dáil, although I agree with the Minister on this occasion, particularly as the Government is about to fall. I always welcome proper discussion of Bills, however. We can only learn from reading and discussing and then passing a fully comprehensive Bill. I welcome what is in it and appreciate the urgency.

It is unfortunate that we have not seen the amendments that will be brought forward next week. I complimented the Minister and his staff yesterday. It is very important that we have to do it; we are under pressure. Again, however, I would have preferred to have seen those amendments well in advance so we could look at them. The Minister will have my support in passing them, but there are always other issues around amendments, and it helps to have a proper discussion on them.

I have not had much time to study them but if I am right, the amendments to preserve documents are not to compel the handing over of documents but to compel their preservation. We find ourselves now in 2022, after so many inquiries, passing legislation to preserve and stop the destruction of documents. That very welcome and absolutely necessary but when we pause and reflect on it, we are not compelling the handing over of those documents. Documents have not been handed over on a voluntary basis. We are now sending out a message to please not destroy them and to preserve them. When we think about that, what does it tell us about what religious orders have learned or failed to learn or what Governments have failed to learn? One would imagine, after all the reports, that they would be queuing up to hand over the records so that we could have a full and comprehensive understanding of how we had 100 years of institutionalisation.

The "architecture of institution" was Professor Smith's term. Maybe I am not using it precisely, but the concept is the same. We had 100 years of confinement and institutionalisation. We now have a situation where we are forced, in the dying days of this Government, to force through legislation to insist on the preservation of these documents. To put that into perspective, we have material in the briefing documents we received, and I pay tribute to the three members who were at the briefing yesterday, namely, Dr. Maeve O'Rourke, Dr. Mark. Coen and Ms Patricia Carey, and particularly to those people on the ground who have taken the trouble to send us emails and educate us. We know from Dr. Coen - I do not have the precise year, but sometime over the last couple of years - that financial accounts of the Donnybrook Magdalen laundry were found in the abandoned former laundry site several years after the interdepartmental committee to establish the facts of State involvement in the Magdalen laundries. That report - the Martin McAleese report - concluded in 2013. I was never happy with that report, and I do not hide that fact. I read it from start to finish. Years after that report told us there were no records on the institution in Donnybrook and, similarly, one in Galway in which I know there are records, Dr. Coen, an academic, found them as a result of the developer letting him onto the site.

If we go back further, while filming for the "States of Fear" documentary in the former Magdalen laundry at Sonderwell in 1988 - that is how many years ago it is now - Sheila Ahern and Mary Raftery came across a large ledger of accounts in a cupboard. The building, of course, had been sold by the Good Shepherd Sisters and was owned then by University College Cork, UCC. They were very good, and made copies of these records of accounts and subsequently returned the ledger to the Good Shepherd Sisters. Ms Ahern said that if they had not found the ledger, it would very likely have ended up dumped.

The third example the Minister or the briefing documents gave us referred to an owner of a pub buying the contents of the Limerick Magdalen laundry at an auction and four financial ledgers from the 1950s being used as props in the pub.

Can you imagine the ledgers being used as props in a pub? They featured in a BBC documentary in 2014. Kindly, the link has been given to us.

Of course, today's legislation comes after continued pressure, including the Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse in 2009; and the collaborative forum, which, I might add, was never published, except the recommendations.

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